A beautifully written portrayal of a Ukrainian family that perhaps resonates now more than ever.
A historical novel focuses on a mother’s search for her children in Ukraine following World War I.
In autumn 1919 Elvira Maria Andrushko and her two children, Ana and Sasha, wait to board a train from the village of Kos, near Kyiv, to Odessa. A young widow, Elvira Maria is seeking safety for her family when a rush to board the train separates her from her kids. Unable to follow them to Odessa until two days later, Elvira Maria frantically combs the city for her family as she struggles to make a life for herself. In the same building where she finds a room lives Michail Lukashenko, a 40-year-old puppeteer and artist (“He was strikingly handsome, his chin dimpled, his black hair still thick, his body lean and muscular”). He eventually takes the struggling widow under his wing and tries to help her find her children. Through Michail, the story connects to a variety of characters in Odessa that allows for the examination of the rising tensions in this city deemed safe: There are revolutionaries and brothel madams, street urchins and gangs. As months go by, Michail and Elvira Maria’s relationship develops beyond friendship. In Grow’s well-crafted novel, Michail is the most intriguing character, with his connection to his childhood companion Ivan Dashkevich, a Bolshevik, a high point. The author’s exploration of this male friendship is compelling and poignant. In addition, the book skillfully examines a variety of historical events, touching on the rise of the Communists in the early 20th century as well as the options for women and the displacement of families during this period. The constant search for Ana and Sasha could have become a tiring and repetitive thread, but Grow, over the course of the year in which the narrative is set, delivers a story full of twists and turns, gripping readers right until the very end.
A beautifully written portrayal of a Ukrainian family that perhaps resonates now more than ever.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798988398202
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Studio 17
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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